The subtitle has much to recommend (at least to me): Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society. It’s a subject I know very little about, but when I stumbled across a reference to it in one of the podcasts I listen to, it sounded interesting, so I ordered it.
My overwhelming problem with it is that it is written as if the reader is already familiar with the subject. If you’re new to the subject and looking for an introductory overview, this is not the book for you. I was looking for some kind of true history of secret societies in America -- something told chronologically and with all the important turning points contextualized in their broader significance. What I got was a lot of jumbled excerpts and vignettes, all loosely cohering around the subtitle’s subject, but none of it forming any kind of narrative or drawing any conclusions.
The best example has got to be a chapter called Raising Tubal-Cain in which Tubal-Cain is never mentioned. I kind of know who the Bible says Tubal-Cain was, but I have to think that I’m relatively unique in that regard. Your average reader is not going to know who Tubal-Cain is, and even I came away with no understanding of why his name was used in the chapter’s title.
In the end, I had to come up with my own conclusion. Here it is. The secret societies described in this book all sound like either secular religions that in some cases supported and in other cases opposed the sectarian religions of their time, or they sound like social clubs arranged for networking and career advancement. They all incorporate the trappings of mysticism, but those trappings are exactly and only that -- trappings -- and it is those trappings that attract either the attention or the ire of outsiders.
I don’t see it going any deeper than that.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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